Monday, 6 October 2014

Designed: The Intoxicated Books Book Three

http://www.amazon.com/Designed-Intoxicated-Books-Book-3-ebook/dp/B00LLRQ4NS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412639055&sr=8-1&keywords=Designed+alicia
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Author: Alicia Renee Kline
Genre: Chick-lit, Romance, Humor
Book Rating: 9
Personal Rating: 9.5

The third installment of the intoxicated series was my favorite.  It may not have been the funniest of the three, or even the steamiest, but the plot was executed the best.  It had far less of those little intentional drama points in chick lit fair that stretch the limits of real life drama.  Basically no matter how outrages a situation got in this novel, it actually made good logical sense.

Why not start of with my favorite character, Gracie.  She is just mind-blowingly hilarious.  Says the types of things you expect a best friend to say.  Just cold hard unfiltered math that makes you want to strangle her and love her all at the same time.  The parts she gets in this book were my faves.  She gets the best dialogue and thankfully there’s more of her in this book.  And if she doesn’t end up with who I think she should be with in the next book I swear I will never read another one of these novels…. Okay that’s a lie but she better get the man I want her to have.

Blake.  I was worried about her big secret, and yaay to me for being right.  The reason I was worried though was because I was afraid I’d feel the same way I did about it as I did Lauren’s bad decision at the end of book one.  No need to fear when you couple age, emotions and the need to grow your own independence it’s perfectly justifiable that she did what she did, when she did.  My only problem was that she held on to it for so long.  Really, keeping someone mad at you for something you know you did when you were a stupid young teen is ridiculous.  Almost a decade.  Who pretends to be mad at someone for that long, someone who is madly in love with them, for something they don’t even know happened?  No one knows accept Blake.  Lauren was right and Blake needed to suck it up and talk about it.  But gladly her friends sorted that nonsense out for her.

Okay Mathew and Lauren’s wedding.  Nothing like a good solid romance, to balance out the turmoil that was Blake and Chris.  And they even have a surprise.  Man, love is in the air and it’s infectious.  Well to everyone but the self induced brooding Blake.  Not much to say there except their two characters were handled very well in this book and the wedding was… well you’ll have to read it.

Chris.  Well he pulled through after being such a jerk towards Lauren.  You cant hate someone who loves a woman for ten years especially when she goes out of her way to loathe the very ground you walk on.  The balance with him and Blake was handled well.  When they avoided eachother it didn’t reach annoying over dramatic heights.  When they had to stare at eachother, the mutual fake loathing was just enough to bare without screaming ‘get over it already’, and the suspense of them being in the wedding together and either completely screwing it up or maybe finally getting back together was delightfully held on edge right up until the point of collision.  Brilliant.

The pacing.  I was going to hate on the flash back style of the beginning.  It was like ‘we already know about this’ and blah blah blah.  I could piece together what went down back in the day with the two arrests of Mathew and jail time and so on, on my own.  But firstly, right when I was about to be like ‘enough’ they were over.  Perfect timing.  And secondly even though some of the information I still think was repetitive.  The other stuff was very good character building in showing where Mathew has come from, showing how the sibling bond grew so strong when it was fairly nonexistent in the beginning.  It shows the events that molded her into the powerful single independent woman she is.  The type of life she lived with the parents neither she or Mathew claim.  And it shows this love with Chris she had and just how strong it was.  Basically all the things needed to firmly place us in the we care for everyone frame of mind was there, and in just the right dose to not be annoyed and scream get on with the story.  Another job well done.

Okay that bit of pacing aside the rest went well too.  When all the big reveals and such happened I looked at my page count.  Nothing seemed to drag, and always happened at a point where I was “hmmm this much pages left.  Not a bad place to put this then.”  And I like that feeling.  It means things are happening fast enough and there is the right amount of book left to develop what is happening with out overdoing it or rushing it.  Much better placement then in the first two.  So overall the book had good flow.  That is until after the secret.

Revealing it once yes.  Confusion over eachoters reactions to that first conversation, okay.  But kind of like how I felt in the first two books, the ending was filled with too much of the same conversation.  The same fears, the same I didn’t want to cause, and I wish you would’ve told me cause, and so on and so forth.  There were lots of thought processes linked to the big reveal that were brilliant, because they were attached but by way of dealing with something else.  Those I loved and of course are the type of spoilers even I can’t reveal.  The other stuff that seemed solely about the big reveal always seemed to be the same convo just worded differently.  Just too much of it and again it seemed to pull me out of a rather excellent novel.  Thankfully this only lasted for a while. It was at the beginning of the third act so there was still some book to go once this was all done.

So did I love this book?  Yes.  It was great in the sense that I can’t really think of any of those annoying things that happen in chick lit that happened in this book.  In fact everytime one did happen it played out in rather entertaining ways that were completely not the way they would’ve if the author went garden-variety chick lit fashion.  This book was funny, romantic, intense, just a joy to read.  But I like this entire series so maybe my opinion is flawed.  And yes I’m a man who loves chick lit.  Nothing beats sexual humor.  It’s the realest humor you can find and everyone uses it when chilling with their friends at the bar hashing stories about their lives past, present and future and also while cruising the people at the bar. 

If you’re looking for a fun read with a little bit of drama, a dash of romance and splashed with funny one liners, you can’t go wrong here.  This is definitely a good glass of wine screw the world I’m reading today kind of novel.  A pic me up on those well needed days when life is screaming it’s annoying realness at you.  This will help you relax and wind down, and block out the real world with something much more rewarding.  And there’s another book coming.  I can’t wait to read it.

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